Dracula @ Contact, Manchester, 10-11 Oct

Turning a book into a dance piece is never easy; with Bram Stoker's Dracula, it is doubly difficult. A long, twisting tale told through newspaper fragments and detailed diary entries, it is not immediately obvious how the narrative would translate from page to stage – and yet the Mark Bruce Company have found a way to make it work, with a sharp, sepulchral production of Dracula that visits Manchester’s Contact Theatre this month.

While sticking with the basic structure, Bruce and his team have refined and revised the story. There is no dialogue, so the production uses atmospheric Eastern European music and complex sets to convey changes of time and place, while the dancers emote and evoke with their bodies alone. However, says Bruce, the core of what makes the book so good has remained: "Dracula gets under people's skin. I think people identify with him... perhaps there's something of the vampire in all of us."

Indeed, Dracula has become one of fiction’s most enduring characters. It is not just that he drinks blood and is undead – though that is frightening enough. It is that he has terrifying reserves of superhuman strength and intellect that allow him to maim and/or manipulate anyone who stands in his way. Jonathan Goddard as Dracula successfully shows all sides of this complex character, smooth and slippery one moment, jerky and ethereal the next. While the production does a great job of, as Bruce puts it, "capturing the magic" of Dracula, we would still recommend reading up on the plot beforehand – it can be a touch tricky to follow otherwise. 

Accessible, and without the total abstraction that often alienates people from dance performances, this is a piece for those unfamiliar with dance as well as those looking to see the art at its best. [Andrew Anderson]